Bobby Allyn

I mean, in the best of times, one former chair told me, they have like a sixth of the staff of the SEC.

So even if there was a different political environment and the CFTC really did want to be super hard on this industry and play hardball,

they wouldn't have the capacity to do it.

Yeah, the fight against these apps on the state level has been bipartisan.

Governors who are both Republican and Democrat have been coming after these companies.

There's more than 20 pending lawsuits against just Kalshi over its continued legal status.

In the U.S.

and essentially what a lot of these states are saying is they made – the apps made an end run around gambling laws and are allowing teenagers, right, because the age to get on these apps is 18, not 21 like it is gambling, allowing teenagers to become addicted to gambling with virtually no help whatsoever.

You know, in states where there is legal gambling, there's all sorts of rules about, hey, if I'm addicted to gambling and I want to like self-ban myself from this app, you have to let me do that.

That doesn't apply to Kelshi and Polymarket.

There's all sorts of mitigation and gambling addiction sort of resources that are not present when in states where these apps are legal.

are really thriving.

But the status of the lawsuits, the short version is they're all pending.

And there's a couple cases that are in federal appeals courts.

And most legal watchers say eventually there's going to be an appeal that the Supreme Court will consider.

Now, the Trump administration maintains states have no authority to regulate these markets.

Here's CFTC Chair Michael Selig in a recent interview with CNBC.

And I think it's going to take either an act of Congress or the Supreme Court taking a case to finally clarify what's going on here, because right now it is just a total patchwork of chaos.

I'd say for the next three years, at least, that they're only gonna become more and more popular.

I think there's a chance, regardless of what the next administration is, that there's a different political and legal approach to this industry.